PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Before the Artist Became a Mystic

By CHARLES HAGEN

Published: January 27, 1995

By the time of his death in 1976 at the age of 67, Minor White had become one of the most paradoxical figures in photography. Widely respected as a photographer and teacher, he was also increasingly the subject of distrust and even scorn from younger artists put off by his sweeping and often esoteric pronouncements about the nature of photography and creation.

With his flowing white hair, a circle of devoted acolytes, and often cryptic statements about such topics as Art and Spirit (usually at least implicitly capitalized), White lent himself to parody, and his celebrity overwhelmed his reputation as a photographer. A small but well-selected show at the 292 Gallery in SoHo offers a chance to look again at White as an artist, before he became a guru.

In his teaching and his photography White was influenced by Alfred Stieglitz, whom he met in 1946. Like Stieglitz, he tried to find formal parallels for emotional or spiritual states in natural phenomena.

But where Stieglitz turned to the roiling patterns of clouds to make the images he called "Equivalents," White often used pictures of waves or rock forms. Some of his earliest examples of this kind of work were taken in Point Lobos, Calif., where another of his shaping influences, Edward Weston, made many of his own best-known pictures.

Many of White's most important photographs are close-ups of frost patterns on the windows of his apartment in Rochester, where he lived during the 1950's. In the translucent textures and forms of frost, he found shapes that suggest natural phenomena as diverse as exploding nebulae and the lines traced by subatomic particles.

In a print from 1952, for example, starlets of frost float against a gray background that seems to recede ambiguously from the picture plane. In a 1958 image, a jagged white line of frost evokes the nervous marks of Paul Klee's paintings while forming what appears to be a mountainous nighttime landscape, complete with stars overhead.

White's art was essentially metaphoric rather than descriptive, but he never abandoned photographic representation for pure abstraction. Even some of the most formal photographs are given straightforward descriptive titles: "Barnacles," "Knothole."

Such modest titles dispose quickly of the inevitable question asked of any photograph: what is it? But rarely do they even hint at the kinds of transformations White tried to achieve in his pictures.

In "Sunspot in Cracked Mud," for example, taken at Capitol Reef, Utah, in 1961, a bright white ball seems to be emerging from, or dragging upward, a thrusting form covered in scales. Another picture from Capitol Reef transforms a rock form into a pounding ocean wave, while a twig in a vase in front of a frosted window becomes a riverlike black line streaming down the frame.

In the small world of art photography in the 1950's and 1960's, White played an exceptionally influential role. As the editor of Aperture magazine from its founding in 1952 until his death, White brought an eclectic stew of ideas to its pages, including the teachings of Zen, the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff and Gestalt psychology.

A central aspect of White's attitude toward photography was simply that it could be used for more than journalism, and in fact was capable of symbolic and emotional expressions as complex and subtle as those produced in any other art form. This in itself was an unusual notion at a time when the populist reporting of Life magazine was seen as the highest possible use of photography.

One question White pursued in Aperture and in workshops was how best to interpret or read a photograph. Among other tactics, he advocated using meditation techniques to get beyond the surface meanings of images.

He also developed extended series of photographs related not by shared subject matter or narrative links, but by formal and intuitive connections. Four prints in the current show come from one of these series, and suggest the complex interactions he would establish within these groups.

By the end of the 1960's, though, White's brand of abstraction and painfully sincere spiritual searching had lost its attraction for many photographers. With the rise of Pop Art and the coming of the Kennedy era, Robert Frank's romanticism and the urban ironies of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus came to the fore.

White continued to promote his introspective and mystical view of photography through teaching, publications and exhibitions, but his work as a photographer assumed a diminished place among his many activities. Occasionally, he still made striking photographs, including a 1970 image of a diamond-shaped metal marker in Nova Scotia that he manipulated in printing to make more eerie and otherworldly.

In the end, his pictures became for him simply a means to an end, the consideration of his inner self, which he could reach in other ways equally well. But this welcome exhibition offers a chance to consider the complexities of his work not only as a spiritual guide, but also as a photographer.